Translated from the German original, «Abgestellt in der Armee».

It’s evening in the common room, during one of my refresher courses, somewhere between two days of service. We’re lounging around, half in uniform, half already tired. One of the troop cooks, one who answers to me in the kitchen, is telling us about a woman he met, and then comes the line I’ve kept the longest. What would he do, he laughs, if she turned out to be trans. The others laugh along. I don’t laugh. I don’t say anything either. I sit there, his superior, in the same uniform, and no one in the room suspects that he is talking about someone like me. I have to force myself not to cry, not to say anything. I stay silent and secretly count the days.

I served. Sergeant, head cook, I cooked for the company, hundreds of plates, and I was proud of my work. That is exactly what makes this evening so bitter. It isn’t a stranger talking like this. It’s one of my own kitchen.

I still owe the army fourteen days of service. And yet I had already paid, several thousand francs in the military service exemption tax. Though it wasn’t my doing. After I had earned my rank, the army simply forgot me, stopped calling me up, and for the years without service the bill came. My plan was to make up the remaining days at some point and get the money back. That’s what the law provides: whoever fulfils their duty in full has the tax refunded.

Then I began hormone therapy. Estradot, a patch every three days. A few months later the marching orders for the next refresher course arrived, the same company. My body had already begun to change. And I knew exactly which room I would be returning to.

It wasn’t even about anything big. It was about the shower. I can’t use the men’s shower, not anymore. But not the women’s either. For someone like me, mid-transition, the army has provided no place, not even one as banal as this. On top of that the shared quarters, the same men, the same lines. I knew I couldn’t endure it again. I never reported for that refresher course.

So I did what one is supposed to do. I turned to the army’s office for Women in the Armed Forces and Diversity, the office that exists for cases exactly like this. The army leadership, its website says, tolerates no discrimination and no sexism and commits itself to a culture of openness. I asked for the simplest thing I could think of: a transfer to another unit for the last fourteen days, where I would be safer.

The answer was friendly and useless. They couldn’t transfer me, the office had no say in that. What I could do was report the remarks or address the people directly. In plain terms that meant: I should out myself, in front of the very people I was afraid of. That was when I understood something. For me this office was useless. Listening and advising, that it could do. It didn’t even refer me onward, let alone intervene. At the moment I needed it, it could do nothing. Only on paper.

Because no one could offer me a safe environment, in the end there was a stamp: doubly unfit. Unfit for military service, unfit for civil protection. That sounds like a solution, but it’s a trap. Because whoever doesn’t complete the total service obligation, and I am fourteen days short, doesn’t get the paid tax back. No one offered me a real alternative, only this stamp. And with it the army keeps my money. For something that wasn’t my fault. No one meant it this way. It simply hasn’t been thought through, a gap that someone like me falls through. Yet another one.

I wrote to everyone who might be responsible. The canton replied that they only carry out the laws, they don’t make them, that’s up to politics. The federal tax administration wrote that it wasn’t their area. The military medical service referred me onward. Every office was polite, every one was somehow right, and none was responsible. That’s how it feels to be a case that gets pushed from desk to desk until it gives up on its own. Acceptance was never lacking. Everyone was friendly, no one stumbled over my name. Only a solution, no one had that.

I didn’t give up, but not because of the apparatus. Because of two people. The Independent Ombuds Office for Members of the Armed Forces, a small office I found by chance, took up my case. No form, no referral. They picked up the phone. They called around, spoke with the diversity office, with the medical service, and found ways no one had told me about before.

There was, they said, a special examination commission that decides not only on fitness but also looks for safe conditions. There was, for example, a place, a medical unit of the army, where they are used to people serving under special circumstances. One of the two left all of this on my voicemail, then wrote it down for me again, and even attached a suggestion for how I might word my email to the responsible doctor. Suddenly there was no longer a stamp, but a path.

In the end there was a solution that two people had secured for me, and no office. Through the special commission I was allowed to complete my remaining days at the Kloten military base. A home-sleeper, home in the evening, back to the barracks in the morning. The problem with the shower no longer arose, because I no longer stayed there overnight. No one had solved it, it had been circumvented. For me, just this once. You only put yourself through all of this if you want the money back. The next trans woman will stand in front of the same shower and write her way through the same offices. Or simply give up looking for a solution.

I no longer had a task there. I sat at an unfamiliar base and sat out my days, without a function. I wanted to serve, everyone knew that. It wasn’t on me, there was simply no place left for me. No company with a single shower, no private room, nothing. I was sidelined. And here too, at the lunch table, a remark fell about trans people. I sat there and to this day don’t know whether he suspected that one of us was at the table. I said nothing.

I don’t believe these men are evil. It’s the constellation. Men among themselves, close together, day and night, and somehow each has to make a cruder remark than the last. About women, about gays, about trans people. The tone is sexist, completely matter-of-fact, and no one notices. And yet the army wants more women. It courts them and is at the same time a place where women are talked about like this. For someone like me a room like that becomes impossible.

It would be easy to tell this as a happy ending. But I can’t get past the beginning. In the end it was two people who picked up the phone who helped, no office. Because the fault lies in the system. An office for women and inclusion that is meant to help, but cannot. A gap in the law that I fall through, because no one feels responsible. This isn’t bad luck. It’s a systemic failure, and it needs to be fixed.

Sometimes I think back to the common room. To the laughter, to my silence. I don’t belong there anymore, not like that. But I won’t stop speaking. This time not in the shared quarters, but here.